'Giant' may live beyond its off-Broadway limited run

Updated 9:44 am, Thursday, November 22, 2012

Photo: Joan Marcus

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Brian d'Arcy James in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place through December 2. Photo credit: Joan Marcus. less

Brian d'Arcy James in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place through December 2. Photo credit: ... more

Photo: Joan Marcus

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The original production of "Giant" in 2009 ran three acts and four hours. The revised production received promising reviews after the authors tightened the show by one act and one hour.

The original production of "Giant" in 2009 ran three acts and four hours. The revised production received promising reviews after the authors tightened the show by one act and one hour.

Photo: Joan Marcus

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Brian d'Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place through December 2. Photo credit: Joan Marcus. less

Brian d'Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place through December 2. ... more

Photo: Joan Marcus

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PJ Griffith as Jett and Michele Pawk as Luz in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place
PJ Griffith and Michele Pawk in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place through December 2. Photo credit: Joan Marcus. less

PJ Griffith as Jett and Michele Pawk as Luz in Giant, music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, book by Sybille Pearson, and directed by Michael Greif, running at The Public Theater at Astor Place
PJ Griffith ... more

"Giant" began life as a best-selling 1952 novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber - a sprawling epic about the making of modern Texas, spanning three generations of a wealthy cattle-ranching family from the 1920s to the '50s.

It reached its widest audience through director George Stevens' Oscar-winning 1956 movie starring Rock Hudson as stubbornly traditional rancher Jordan "Bick" Benedict; Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie, the Virginia aristocrat he marries and clashes with when she proves more progressive than he; and James Dean as Jett Rink, the surly ranch hand who strikes oil and becomes a millionaire, maintaining his crush on Leslie and his grudge against Bick.

Virtually unanimous raves greeted the show's premiere at off-Broadway's Public Theatre last week.

" 'Giant' is the most important new musical to come along since 'The Light in the Piazza,' " Terry Teachout writes in the Wall Street Journal, "a show of immense and fully realized promise. Like 'Oklahoma!' before it, 'Giant' tells an all-American tale in a way that is well-suited to the present moment. It's a myth, but an honest one, enacted with high seriousness and great beauty."

"One of the finest new American musicals in recent memory," says Entertainment Weekly, noting the show's "surprising depths" and "epic but human sweep that will draw you in."

Born in Kalamazoo, Mich., Ferber spent most of her adult life in New York and was a member of the fabled Algonquin Circle of literary wits. She achieved her own stage successes with three classic plays co-authored with George S. Kaufman: "The Royal Family," "Dinner at Eight" and "Stage Door." But she was best known for her novels, colorful sagas of romance and rivalry usually set against historical backgrounds in a region or state undergoing dramatic change - life along the Mississippi in "Show Boat," the Oklahoma Territory in "Cimarron," Alaska's progression from wilderness to statehood in "Ice Palace."

"Giant" follows the triangle of Bick, Leslie and Jett, as well as Bick's growing conflicts with son Jordy Jr. But it's also about social and political change, taking in Texas' shift from cattle country to oilfields, as well as anti-Mexican prejudice - which hits home when Jordy Jr. marries a Mexican-American woman.

Ferber made several trips to Texas to gather background for "Giant," basing the character of Jett Rink on fabled wildcatter and eccentric millionaire Glenn McCarthy, who built Houston's Shamrock Hotel.

Ferber's great-niece Julie Gilbert, also the author's biographer and executor, set the process of musicalizing "Giant" in motion. She first suggested the idea to LaChiusa more than a decade ago, but he initially deemed a stage adaptation impossible. When Gilbert suggested the project again in 2006, he returned to the book and began to see its possibilities. He asked Pearson to join the project; she, too, had to overcome her initial impression that the huge, complicated, multidecade narrative could never be tamed.

When first produced at Virginia's Signature Theatre in 2009, the show ran three acts and four hours. Greif came aboard as the show's new director before its next staging, earlier this year at the Dallas Theatre Center. Greif and the authors tightened the show by one act and one hour before the Dallas run, which drew a promising reception. "Giant" underwent further refinements and some changes in its supporting cast before its New York mounting, a co-production of the Public Theatre and Dallas Theatre Center.

In an interview with Playbill, Greif compared the new show to the classics of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

"Michael John and Sybille's musical is not only about very intense personal relationships, expressed beautifully in song, but also about how people live in communities and have great heroic, history-changing effects on those communities. They not only made a musical about this marriage, they made a musical about ownership of this land. Is this a cattle ranch or an oil field? Underneath that is a larger issue: Is this American land or Mexican land? Who deserves to be on it? Who gets to say they own this land?"

LaChiusa, who first won acclaim in the '90s with "First Lady Suite" and "Hello Again," is often cited among the best of the younger theater composers, the "post-Sondheim" group also including Adam Guettel ("Light in the Piazza") and Jason Robert Brown ("Parade"). "Giant" has brought the best notices of his career - for instance, Entertainment Weekly's assessment, not only that this score is "richly and satisfyingly complex," but that it also "rolls out hummable song after hummable song."

Considering both the source and the talents involved, some may wonder why "Giant" is playing a limited run off-Broadway rather than an open-ended run on Broadway. Alas, with contemporary Broadway dominated chiefly by shows recycling pop catalogs and Disney cartoons, most ambitious new musicals of recent seasons - especially those with actual new scores - have gone the limited-engagement route, whether in regional theaters or off-Broadway. But then, "Piazza," produced on Broadway by Lincoln Center Theater, generated sufficient enthusiasm to extend from its planned three-month run to more than 500 performances.

After the reviews hit, the Public Theatre extended the run of "Giant" by two weeks, to Dec. 16 - but also said they could not extend it any further. Still, many are predicting the show will wind up on Broadway in spring. It would be a more likely prospect to rule this year's Tony Awards than any other new musical that has opened so far this season.

Wherever it lands, "Giant" as a musical is not going away. Not with online fans circulating the word that it's a flat-out "masterpiece" and critics such as Teachout predicting "this show is built to last."